"Hurricane I" - Ashley Stewart (Minimalism)

gigilzeg

Dec 8, 20208 min read

Updated: Jan 5, 2021

What is Minimalism?

Minimalism, also known as Minimal music, is a compositional technique that employs limited or minimal musical material. The characteristics of this style include steady drones, slow harmonic changes, repetitive patterns or pulses, melodic cells or the use of fragmentary ideas, broken chords, [BBC] and phase shifting (which is the basis of phase music or process music.) "The approach is marked by a non-narrative, non-teleological and non-representational approach and calls attention to the activity of listening by focusing on the internal processes of the music." [Wikipedia] Composer and scientist David Cope, also lists the following qualities as possible characteristics of minimalism; silence, concept music, brevity, continuities: requiring slow modulation of one or more parameters, phase and pattern music, including repetition. [Wikipedia]

In 1968, composer Michael Nyman, we believe used the word minimal in relation to music for the first time. He wrote an expanded definition of minimal music in his 1974 book titled "Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond." The term Minimalism is also said to have been coined by self-identified minimalist and composer Tom Johnson when he worked as a music critic for The Village Voice. Johnson describes minimalism as follows;

"The idea of minimalism is much larger than many people realize. It includes, by definition, any music that works with limited or minimal materials: pieces that use only a few notes, pieces that use only a few words of text, or pieces written for very limited instruments, such as antique cymbals, bicycle wheels, or whiskey glasses. It includes pieces that sustain one basic electronic rumble for a long time. It includes pieces made exclusively from recordings of rivers and streams. It includes pieces that move in endless circles. It includes pieces that set up an unmoving wall of saxophone sound. It includes pieces that take a very long time to move gradually from one kind of music to another kind. It includes pieces that permit all possible pitches, as long as they fall between C and D. It includes pieces that slow the tempo down to two or three notes per minute." [Wikipedia]

A few of the composers who utilized the minimalist style include John Adams, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and the aforementioned Michael Nyman. Interestingly, both Glass and Reich state that they drew inspiration and took very seriously the music of Louis Thomas Harding who is known as Moondog. Moondog's compositions in 1940 and 1950 were based on counterpoint developing statically over steady pulses in often unusual time signatures which showcases many of the important elements of what is minimalism.

About Ashley Stewart:

Composer Ashley Stewart is a composition major at the University of South Carolina.

She can be contacted for more information or to be commissioned at: ashley.m.stewart14@gmail.com

Hurricane I:

Stewart's piece "Hurricane I" showcases many of the aforementioned minimalist techniques including repetitive patterns or pulsing, minimal musical material including using limited pitches in this case (C, Db, Eb, G, Ab, Bb, B), and steady drones.

Exploring further Phase Music and Process Music:

Phase Music is a compositional technique in which a repetitive phrase or same part is played on two musical instruments in steady but not identical tempi. Gradually the two instruments will shift out of unison creating an echo, then doubling effect, then complex ringing effect, then reversing the effects back to a unison. Another way to describe it is that it is a rhythmic equivalent of cycling through the phase of two waveforms as in phasing. It is influenced by Terry Riley's earlier use of tape looping and delay and in 1965 composer Steve Reich experimented with these looping techniques and accidentally discovered phase shifting. He describes it as being similar to an infinite canon or round as seen in medieval music. One example is Steve Reich's "Clapping Music" as seen in this video.

Process Music in short is music that arises from a process that may or may not be audible to the listener. It involves specific systems of choosing and arranging notes through pitch and time, often involving a long term change with a limited amount of musical material or transformations of musical events that are already complex in themselves. [Wikipedia] Steve Reich defines process music not as "the process of composition but rather pieces of music that are, literally, processes. The distinctive thing about musical processes is that they determine all the note-to-note (sound-to-sound) details and the overall form simultaneously. (Think of a round or infinite canon.)" [Wikipedia]

One example of this technique, albeit using this technique in a way that is slightly harder to conceptualize, is John Cage's "Organ2/ASLSP" also known as As Slow as Possible. Which is one of the longest-lasting musical performances yet undertaken as Cage decided to omit the details of exactly how slowly the piece should be played. The performance of this organ version at St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany began on September 5th, 2001 and is scheduled to last 639 years, ending in 2640. The latest chord/sound change took place on September 5th, 2020 and the next will be February, 5th 2022. [Wikipedia] Here is a video for more information regarding this piece:

Who is Phillip Glass:

This biography taken from Phillip Glass' own website provides a comprehensive overview of the composer and his body of work as well as a definition of what minimalism means to him.

"Through his operas, his symphonies, his compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations with artists ranging from Twyla Tharp to Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen to David Bowie, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times.

The operas – “Einstein on the Beach,” “Satyagraha,” “Akhnaten,” and “The Voyage,” among many others – play throughout the world’s leading houses, and rarely to an empty seat. Glass has written music for experimental theater and for Academy Award-winning motion pictures such as “The Hours” and Martin Scorsese’s “Kundun,” while “Koyaanisqatsi,” his initial filmic landscape with Godfrey Reggio and the Philip Glass Ensemble, may be the most radical and influential mating of sound and vision since “Fantasia.” His associations, personal and professional, with leading rock, pop and world music artists date back to the 1960s, including the beginning of his collaborative relationship with artist Robert Wilson. Indeed, Glass is the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film and in popular music – simultaneously.

He was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud. Finding himself dissatisfied with much of what then passed for modern music, he moved to Europe, where he studied with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (who also taught Aaron Copland , Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones) and worked closely with the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble – seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer.

The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed “minimalism.” Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops.

There has been nothing “minimalist” about his output. In the past 25 years, Glass has composed more than twenty five operas, large and small; twelve symphonies; three piano concertos and concertos for violin, piano, timpani, and saxophone quartet and orchestra; soundtracks to films ranging from new scores for the stylized classics of Jean Cocteau to Errol Morris’s documentary about former defense secretary Robert McNamara; string quartets; a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, and Doris Lessing, among many others. He presents lectures, workshops, and solo keyboard performances around the world, and continues to appear regularly with the Philip Glass Ensemble." [Phillip Glass]

Akhnaten

A prime example of Phillip Glass's use of minimalism is his three act opera based on the life and religious convictions of Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten, also known as Amenhotep IV. Written in 1983, "Akhnaten", was commissioned by Württembergische Staatstheater, Stuttgart and was premiered the next year, at the Stuttgart State Theatre, under the German title "Echnaton." One element of what makes "Akhnaten" so unique is the text which is taken from original sources and sung in the original languages while being strung together by narrator commentary in a modern language, usually German or English. "Egyptian texts of the period are taken from a poem of Akhenaten himself, from the Book of the Dead, and from extracts of decrees and letters from the Amarna Period, the seventeen-year period of Akhenaten's rule. Other portions are in Akkadian and Biblical Hebrew. Akhnaten's Hymn to the Sun is sung in the language of the audience." [Wikipedia]

Glass states that this work is the culmination of his two other biographical operas, Satyagraha (about Mahatma Gandhi) and Einstein on the Beach (about Albert Einstein). The thread he draws is that "Akhenaten, Einstein and Gandhi were all driven by an inner vision which altered the age in which they lived, in particular Akhenaten in religion, Einstein in science, and Gandhi in politics." [Wikipedia] To that end, one editorial which included information regarding Akhnaten state that "The opera’s big centerpiece, “Hymn to the Sun,” is one of the most rapturously lyrical moments Glass has created, but with contrasting chorus and the pharaoh’s solo vocal lines that suggest how Akhnaten had visionary qualities well beyond those of his contemporaries." [WQXR]

Quotations from the aforementioned editorial of "Philip Glass's Operatic Journey" written by David Patrick Stearns of WQXR note a turning point in how Glass used sound.

"Works for his own ensemble tend to be in black and white. His more expansive manner in Akhnaten has an ear for sound that creates its own ancient Egyptian world, balancing the cool objectivity of Glass’s minimalism with a new, heat-generating sense of sound...His minimalist manner tends to magnify whatever is in the visual vicinity - both with the emotional neutrality of his musical mechanics and the intuitive appeal of his instrumentation." [WQXR]

Additionally he writes, "Most important, Glass uses the same kind of compositional materials in radically different ways. In his film / opera hybrid La Belle et la Bête, Glass uses of leitmotifs. In his operas, he sometimes stays out of the way of the story, basically giving it a frame, such as The Fall of the House of Usher. These are works that I find the least satisfying. His portrait operas tend to enshrine his characters, often with great beauty and imagination but not in ways that I find emotionally absorbing in the usual operatic way. " [WQXR]

Although this is not necessarily a glowing review of Glass's body of work it could be argued with minimalism that studying both the negative reaction as well as the positive is needed. It would be more absurd to assume that everyone would enjoy every work in the style. There is much to be learned from the critique of a piece but also when we consider why we feel a certain way about what music should or should not be, especially regarding opera.